On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City burned, killing 146 workers.
Later renamed the "Brown Building", it still stands at 23–29 Washington Place near Washington Square Park, on the New York University (NYU) campus. The building has been designated a National Historic Landmark and a New York City landmark.
The Triangle Shirtwaist factory occupied the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the Asch Building, which still stands at 23-29 Washington Place beside Washington Square Park in Manhattan. The shirtwaist factory is now called the Brown Building, and is part of the New York University campus.
(pg 582), a fire in New York's Triangle Shirtwaist Company in 1911 killed 146 people, mostly women. They died because the doors were locked and the windows were too high for them to get to the ground. Dramatized the poor working conditions and let to federal regulations to protect workers.
“There were over 20 laws passed which changed fire safety, building safety, charged the state with worker safety.”
Bessie Cohen, who as a 19-year-old seamstress escaped the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in which 146 of her co-workers perished in 1911, died on Sunday in Los Angeles.
This is the site where, four months before the Triangle fire, on Saturday, Nov. 26, 1910, another sweatshop burst into flames, killing more than two dozen women and girls. History, like life, has its own perverse winner-take-all quality: the biggest moments are remembered; the others often fade away.
The Brown Building , formerly known as the Asch Building, was the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire on March 25, 1911. One hundred and forty-six garment workers died in the blaze. It was the deadliest industrial disaster in New York City history.
The Triangle Waist Company factory was located on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the Asch Building. About five hundred people worked there. Most of them were young immigrant women and girls with roots in Southern and Eastern Europe. Many were Jewish.
On the afternoon of March 25, a fire started on the eighth floor of the Asch Building when sparks from a discarded match or cigarette ignited a scrap bin filled with fabric cuttings. In a small space draped with flammable cloth, the fire spread explosively. Within five minutes, the eighth floor was consumed. Workers managed to warn employees on the tenth floor. But they had no way to reach the ninth—and no fire alarm system they could trigger. The emergency fire hose would not turn on.#N#As the blaze became an inferno, terrified workers from the eighth floor began escaping down the stairwell. Two elevator operators made valiant, repeated trips to the factory floors, saving at least 150 people. People on the tenth floor made it to the roof, where they were rescued by a class of NYU law students in the building next door who stretched ladders across to let them climb to safety. But their colleagues on the ninth floor did not know the fire had started until it arrived. By then there were few options left.#N#On the street below, New Yorkers enjoying the spring weather realized something was wrong when puffs of smoke started to emerge from the building’s upper floors. Bystanders rang the alarm bells in the street-level fire boxes. As fire engines rushed toward the building, human figures appeared in the windows. Workers on the ninth floor had tried to use one of the staircases—only to find that the door was locked, a method that managers used to keep employees from taking unauthorized breaks. A few people managed to make it to the roof or the elevator and safety.#N#But many others, with no other way to escape the flames, jumped or fell from the windows to the street, a hundred feet below. The firefighters’ life nets proved useless. Horrified onlookers could do nothing but watch. “I learned a new sound that day,” wrote journalist William Gunn Shepard, “a sound more horrible than description can picture—the thud of a speeding living body on a stone sidewalk.” Soon the rickety fire escape twisted and collapsed, hurling more people to their deaths. Others died from their burns or from inhaling the heavy smoke.
They stayed out for three months. The massive strike was known as the “ Uprising of the 20,000 .”.
A group memorial to them, erected in the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn and Queens, now bears their names.
The Brown Building was added to the National Register of Historic Places and designated a National Historic Landmark on July 17, 1991. On March 25, 2003, it was named a New York City Landmark. As of 2020, it hosts classrooms and science labs.
Although innovations like fire stairs and sprinklers were available, the Asch Building did not have them. Nor did most other factories. A fire drill had never been conducted there.